Both are free, both are native, and both are built by people who think a Mac editor should feel like a Mac application. The differences are narrower than with any other editor on this site — and one of them is closing this autumn.
Independent product · Not affiliated with CotEditorFigures checked 30 August 2026
Side by side
What each project publishes.
Only claims with a published source on both sides appear in this table. Where one of us does not publish a figure, the row says so rather than guessing at it.
Published facts
CotEditor
Linelark Studio
Version compared
7.0.8 (6 August 2026)
1.4.0 (30 August 2026)
Runs on
macOS 15 or later
macOS 14 or later, universal for Intel and Apple silicon
Price
Free
Free
What that buys
Free and open source, distributed through the Mac App Store.
Free permanently. No paid tier, no subscription, no licence key.
Licensing
Open source; the project publishes its own licence terms rather than a standard SPDX identifier.
Free, closed source, Apple-notarized direct download. A sandboxed App Store edition exists without the terminal or git.
CotEditor figures read from its own pages on 30 August 2026; see sources. Linelark figures reflect Studio 1.4.0 and were verified against its shipping source. Prices and versions move — if this page has aged, the sources below are the authority, not us.
Not a sales page
Where CotEditor is the better choice.
Every one of these is a real reason to close this tab and go and get CotEditor instead. They are here because a comparison that never finds the other editor better is not a comparison.
Genuinely open sourceThe whole editor is on GitHub and can be read, forked or audited. Linelark is not open source, and for some people that ends the comparison.
Sandboxed App Store distributionCotEditor ships through the Mac App Store, sandboxed. Linelark’s App Store edition drops the terminal and git entirely to meet the same rules; the full Studio edition is a direct download.
Vertical text and CJK typesettingCotEditor supports vertical writing mode and is built with Japanese typesetting in mind. Linelark has nothing equivalent.
Character inspectorInspect the Unicode data behind any character in the document. Linelark has no such inspector.
Scripting the editor itselfCotEditor can be driven with AppleScript and Unix scripts. Linelark’s plugin API is JavaScript-only and deliberately narrow.
More bundled syntaxes than it looksMore than 60 pre-installed languages, close to Linelark’s 69, and its syntax definitions are user-editable in the UI.
Announced, not yet shipped
Folder-wide searchCotEditor 7.1 adds folder search to the sidebar. It is in beta as of 7.1.0-beta.5 (29 August 2026) and not in the 7.0.8 stable release. 7.1 also raises the requirement to macOS 26 Tahoe.
Recorded separately because a feature on its way is not a feature that is missing, and this page would otherwise be wrong the week it ships.
The other direction
What Linelark does that is worth the switch.
Described as things Linelark does, not as things CotEditor lacks. Asserting an absence needs a source saying it is absent, and for most of these nobody publishes one — so check them against CotEditor yourself before deciding.
01
Replace across a folder without rewriting how files are stored
Find and Replace in Files reads each file with its own encoding and line endings and writes it back the same way. A CRLF Windows file stays CRLF; a Shift-JIS file stays Shift-JIS. It skips .git, node_modules, build, DerivedData, .venv and __pycache__, skips anything with a NUL byte in its first kilobyte, skips files over 4 MB, and skips buffers you already have open so unsaved work is never overwritten underneath you.
Eleven encodings, chosen and preserved rather than guessed
UTF-8 with and without BOM, UTF-16 LE and BE, ISO 8859-1, Windows-1252, Windows-1251, Mac OS Roman, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP and US-ASCII, with LF, CRLF or CR endings. A file opens as what it is, and saves as what it was, unless you deliberately convert it.
Up to four panes, and the same buffer open in more than one
Single, two columns, three columns, two rows, or a 2×2 grid. One file can appear in two panes at once — the same buffer, not a copy — so a long file can be read at the top and edited at the bottom.
A real login shell tied to the tab in front of you
The Studio edition starts one login shell per tab, with interactive programs and true-colour output, and exports the front file’s path into it. It is a terminal, not a command runner.
It is free, it is auditable, it is on the App Store, and it does vertical CJK text and Unicode inspection that Linelark has no answer to. Linelark earns its place if you need folder-wide replace today on a Mac older than Tahoe, a terminal beside the file, or a plugin that can drive git. Those are the differences — everything else here is two editors doing the same job well.
Sources
Everything above, and where it came from.
Read 30 August 2026. Each figure on this page traces to one of these pages; none of it is from memory or from a third-party review.
